Homily for Monday, 26 August 2019

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 1:1-5, 8b-10; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; Matthew 23:13-22

Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do we not hear quite a contrast between our readings today from 1 Thessalonians and our Psalm, on one hand, and our Gospel from Matthew on the other hand? Do we not find comfort in St. Paul’s first words of his first letter to the Thessalonians: “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers”?

And is our Psalm not similarly comforting: “For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory”? Our Psalm is the 149th of 150 of the Psalms in our Bible. The last three Psalms in the Biblical Book of Psalms, numbers 148, 149, and 150, make up a set known as the “Hillel” Psalms. If we think of a Hebrew word that sounds similar to “Hillel,” maybe we would think of “Hallelujah,” which literally means “Praise be to God.” And so our Psalm today begins, “Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the faithful.”

This sounds a lot like what we do well already. Certainly, those of us who gather for Mass at 8:00 am daily here at St. James do so with a sense of joy. But it takes a particular amount of commitment anyway to gather here every day (for many of us), rain, snow, or shine, for Mass, to offer our praise to God “in the assembly of the faithful.”

So I think St. Paul’s words to the Thessalonians or the words of the Psalmist could very well be addressed to us. But then what should we make of the Gospel reading we hear today. Jesus’ seeming harshness in our Gospel today is startling: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven”!

I suppose we could focus our attention on the more consoling, gracious words of 1 Thessalonians or our Psalm, or interpret Jesus in our Gospel as directing his harshest criticism at the religious leaders of his time. Jesus’ excoriation of the Pharisees and scribes in Matthew is certainly challenging for me to hear as an ordained minister of the Church: Am I serving the Church with purity of heart? For the times when I or any leader in our Church, ordained or non-ordained, allows ego to take priority over leading us, the baptized faithful, to salvation, I ask for our forgiveness. I ask for our prayers for our leaders, in the Church and in public office in our civil society, that by God’s grace we will serve the betterment of the Church and our civil society.

But I do not think that we should simply put aside Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel today as if they were directed at only religious leaders, or all leaders, in Jesus’ time or ours. Please let me say again: I have great confidence that our devotion to our faith and often-daily Eucharist is strong; it is eminently praiseworthy. So I think the words of praise to the faith communities of the Psalmist’s and St. Paul’s time apply to us here at St. James and in so many places all over the world.

Yet what is our ultimate motivation for all our devotions; our prayers; our gathering for Mass nearly every day, many of us? Do we speak and act for justice; toward bringing every one of the baptized faithful closer to God and God’s saving grace? Do we seek to reconcile divisions in our world, within our Church; within our own relationships, and do we pray for this reconciliation? If so, we rightly and with purity of heart may “sing to the LORD a new song,” a song of “praise in the assembly of the faithful” that God will hear and that will help to bring us to salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 25 August 2019

Readings of the day: Isaiah 66:18-21; Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do many of us ever reflect on the phenomenal diversity in our world of religious faith; of the number of faiths in our world, each with a particular approach to encountering the divine through acts of worship and devotion, and also through acts of individual charity and social justice? Of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth now, 2.4 billion are Christian, and 1.1 billion are Catholic. Even among these 2.4 billion Christians and 1.1 billion Catholics in our world, do we not see great diversity of religious practice, some of which is divisive, even a counter-witness to Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel that we might “all be one,” but much of which is legitimate and enriches our Christian faith and the world?

Our reading today from Isaiah and our Psalm particularly view this diversity of faith in a positive way, especially for the time of these Old Testament writers. Isaiah writes originally to encourage the people of Israel who are nearing the end of a lengthy exile in Babylon, a foreign nation that worshipped gods foreign to Israel and Israel’s God. I suppose Isaiah could have urged the people of Israel to close in on themselves and to develop a set of religious practices and worship of the God of Israel closed off to the rest of the world. But instead Isaiah prophecies that peoples and nations who do not even know the God of Israel, “the coastlands far away that have not heard of [God’s] fame or seen [God’s] glory,” will be drawn to the God of Israel by the descendants of Israel’s exiles to Babylon.

Isaiah does not say how these foreign nations will be drawn to the glory of the God of Israel, only that they will. This presumes that the people of Israel will become messengers, prophets after their prophetic leaders like Isaiah, of the glory and fame, and so right worship of the one God, the God of Israel. But how they will communicate this message and have all the nations accept the glory and right worship of one God remains a mystery as the book of Isaiah ends at the prophecy we hear today.

Our Psalm, even more than Isaiah, emphasizes that the worship of the one God of Israel is and will be for all nations and all peoples. Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in our Bible, proclaims with pithy energy, “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love to us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” Again, though, our Psalm is not specific as to how all peoples and all nations are to praise and extol the LORD, or how they are to experience this “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” of God that the Psalmist proclaims to be so universal. After all, can religious experience ever be exactly uniform everywhere and at all times, even among people of the same faith, let alone among people of different faiths?

If we see our world today, would it not seem that prophecies like those of Isaiah and our Psalm are far from realized? Some experts on these questions estimate that there are about 4 200 recognized religions in the world today. It would seem, then, that we are far from all peoples acknowledging and worshipping one and the same God, much less the God of Israel; the God of “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” extolled by our Psalm.

Even among people of the same religious faith, there is sometimes great diversity in religious experience. There are not only differences in denominational traditions, as we see in Christianity among Eastern and Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but differences within each of those traditions: Differences in particular private devotions and forms of prayer; generational and ethnic differences from one worshipping community, parish, or diocese to another; differences in religious experience created by the increasing mobility of people and globalization nowadays, and so on.

All this diversity and difference can be wonderful, even enriching to a faith community or to the world, but can it not also be a challenge to us? Does this diversity not naturally lead us to ask: When is diversity legitimate or not? What are essential truths (or is there any single Truth) that allow for little or no leeway? Is there one or are there several true religious faiths? And, if there is only one true faith or a limited range of true religious practice, what about the salvation of people who do not belong to the one true faith, who choose not to believe the claims to truth of a particular faith, or have never experienced religious faith? Are people of no faith, by choice or not, saved?

The easy answer to these questions is that all this is a mystery. Whether our God, as we Christians believe God to be the God of all peoples and nations, will save only people of our Christian faith, of many, or all faiths, is beyond our capacity to answer. But simply to evade the question like this may not be helpful to us. In contrast to Isaiah and the Psalmist, whose tone toward the diversity of religious and experience of the peoples and nations around Israel is more accepting, even welcoming (although Isaiah and our Psalm still limit true praise; true worship to one God), in Luke’s Gospel we hear a more exclusive message from Jesus: There is a “narrow door” through which we are to “strive to enter” in order to be saved. The person who asks Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” seems to have understood Jesus’ teaching correctly: Indeed only a few will be saved. But what does Jesus actually mean by this pessimistic-sounding teaching we hear in today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”?

We could go back to evading the question: If we cannot understand what Jesus was trying to teach, why bother continuing to discern what Jesus meant? Or we could try to place Jesus’ teaching about striving “to enter through the narrow door” in the context of the rest of our Gospel reading and of the other readings we hear today. At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are well into their long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Galilee, for the most part Jesus and his teaching and healing ministry had been well-received. In Jerusalem, he would enter the city through its narrow, crowded gates. Within days of being received into the city as a king, he would be expelled from the city and crucified outside its gates. A quick note about Jerusalem: I have been to Jerusalem, so I have experienced literally the narrowness of its gates; its doors. Probably, then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to his impending entrance into the literal city of Jerusalem of his time. More figuratively, to follow Jesus; to be a disciple of Jesus would have meant to follow him through the “narrow door” of the earthly Jerusalem, to the end of a journey that was to lead to death, for Jesus and for many of his earliest disciples. To enter the earthly Jerusalem through its “narrow door,” though, to accept humiliation and even death was and is the only way to resurrection; the only way to salvation; to eternal life.

So I do not think that, by inviting his disciples to “enter through the narrow door,” Jesus is or was excluding anybody who is not of a specific religious faith—who is not Christian, or who was not of Jesus’ own Jewish faith in his time—from the possibility of salvation. In fact, the rest of today’s Gospel reading gives us some needed context on Jesus’ meaning by, “Strive to enter through the narrow door.” Salvation will be denied to those who insist on being “first” at the expense of others they exclude out-of-hand: People who think differently from us; who are of a different religious faith than us; people who look different from us. In this way, people who insist that they can gain salvation on their own, on account of their own wealth or the right ideas or right religious faith and so forth, will be “last” while those dismissed as “last… will be first.”

“The narrow door” is impossible to enter for anybody who tries to enter alone. Salvation cannot be a solo effort. Rather, “the narrow door” will be easier to pass through for any and all who help others to pass through it. Salvation is and must be a communal, whole-Church, whole-world effort. Entrance through “the narrow door” of eternal life is for anybody who not only preaches truth or uses truth in a way that excludes other people who have not experienced the truths we preach, but who lives and gives her or his life in witness to this truth. If we believe in one true God, a God of “steadfast love… faithfulness”; justice and kindness, then these are the values we are to live out to inspire the peoples, nations, and faiths of the world in all their diversity. And we pray that God may ultimately reconcile all this, in a way that is mysterious to us now, into an eternal existence with God that will be open to all nations and all peoples.

Homily for Sunday, 18 August 2019

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

About one hundred years after Jesus’ earthly life, in the ancient city of Sinope, now part of Turkey, there lived a man named Marcion, whose teachings became important in shaping early Christianity. Why would I start with the story of Marcion, from so many centuries ago? Well, Marcion perceived some key differences between what became the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. In the Old Testament, Marcion saw that God was often angry and quick to punish people for wrongdoing. Marcion, though, saw the God of the New Testament, shown through the life of Jesus, to use my word here and not Marcion’s word, to be nicer than the Old Testament God.

In the course of ministry, I have heard people claim only once or twice that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punishing while the God of the New Testament is kinder and more forgiving. So maybe Marcionism is not really popular these days. After all, if we read enough of our Bible (something Marcion did not have the benefit of doing in his time, because the books to be included in the Bible as we know it were not set yet in Marcion’s time), we see instances when, in the Old Testament, God is quite kind and forgiving and, in the New Testament, when God—even Jesus—becomes angry and promises punishment of wrongdoers.

One of those instances when Jesus becomes angry is in the Gospel reading we have just heard. Jesus himself asks and then answers the question: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division”! This does not sound like a very nice Jesus; like the Jesus maybe many of us would associate with peace, forgiveness, love, does it? What does Jesus mean when he says that he has come to bring not “peace to the earth… but rather division”?

Let me suggest that we are right if we get the impression that Jesus is not very nice in today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospels, Jesus is often not very nice… Now, why would I say that? I insist: Jesus is not nice. In the Gospels, including in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is redemptive. Jesus is often tender and forgiving, even of some fairly serious evil and sin. Jesus is loving. Jesus always, even when he is angry or on a prophetic mission, looks out for our utmost well-being. Jesus shows us the way to salvation; he is our way to salvation. So Jesus is kind, in the sense of the kind of love he shows, that goes so far as to lay down his life so that we may have eternal life. But Jesus is not nice.

How do we use the word “nice”? Do we not usually mean somebody who is kind, loving, forgiving, a lot like Jesus usually is in the Gospels? This is nice, but this definition of “nice” is actually quite recent. Not too long ago—about two hundred years ago, which is a short time when we speak of how language changes—“nice” primarily meant “ignorant” or “stupid,” from its Latin origin, meaning “not knowing.” Only since then has “nice” fairly rapidly taken on the more usual sense of something or somebody pleasant, agreeable, or kind.

Then again, we still use “nice” in its older deprecating or insulting sense today. Have any of us ever shown lack of interest, or heard somebody show lack of interest in what another person was saying in a mocking tone, “That’s nice.” I suppose that what we mean by “nice” today is all about our tone and body language in using this word. When we are pleased by something or somebody, we say, “Aww, that’s really nice, thank you,” or simply, “Niiiice”! But we can mean nice in a dismissive way, as in, “I am not interested in this foolishness. Go away”… “That’s nice.”

So I suppose we could consider Jesus to be “nice” in this newer sense of somebody pleasing or kind, but is even this not a stretch when we hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel today? Not “peace to the earth… but rather division” does not exactly sound nice in the sense of kindness or pleasantness. Rather, Jesus sounds a lot like the prophets of the Old Testament before him: People who spoke truth to power; people who spoke for God; who confronted God’s people and their leaders with truths they often did not want to hear; people who risked their own lives in doing so, and who were not exactly “nice” about it much of the time. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who was so persistent in not being especially “nice” as an advisor to King Zedekiah that Zedekiah’s officials had Jeremiah thrown into a cistern and left him to die.

In a similar way, Jesus, “a prophet and more than a prophet,” was persistent in claiming to be God’s own Son; in warning his hearers that their eternal life depended on repentance from their sin; in speaking truth to powerful elites that they did not necessarily want to hear. Jesus was often enough not “nice” about insisting on seeking the utmost good, the salvation, of all people, such that those elites had Jesus crucified and left him to die. Does this not sound familiar?

The prophet Jeremiah was not, in one sense, nice. Jesus was not nice. There is a reason why both Jeremiah and Jesus were killed at the hands of the elites of their day. When Jesus proclaims that he had come not “to bring peace to the earth… but rather division,” he is not saying that he had intended to go out of his way to create divisions among his hearers; his disciples. This would not only not have been nice, but this would have been unkind, and against Jesus’ own rule governing his every action and word. Instead, Jesus always seeks our best interest; our salvation. Yet Jesus knew that, in seeking our best interest, our salvation, his words and actions would expose our division; our sin; everything that already exists to inhibit our way to salvation. Only in exposing our already-existent divisions, sin, unkindness, injustice, and everything that inhibits our salvation that God so dearly desires for us will those divisions, sin, unkindness, and injustices ever be healed and forgiven. And, as many if not all of us know by our own experience, divisions, unkindness, and sin are not distant realities from us. They exist within our own relationships. They exist and destroy the intimacy and trust even within our households and families, as Jesus reminds us today.

Jesus’ reminder of this state of our world into which he came, which has not changed much from Jesus’ time to ours, is hardly nice. It reveals a hard truth many people in Jesus’ time were unwilling to accept, and that many people in our time, I dare say, are no more willing to accept than they were in Jesus’ or Jeremiah’s time. True prophets, who accurately bring to light the state of the world; the state of our human relationships; the state of our relationship with God always speak and act for others’ best interest. Prophecy cannot be ego-driven. But this does not mean prophecy must be nice. Prophecy, if it is true, may go so far as to put at risk the prophet’s reputation, if not his or her very life, if it is true prophecy.

What, then, does this mean for us today? From the moment of our baptism we are called “priest, prophet, and king” in our Rite of Baptism itself. Our baptism calls us to take part in the prophetic mission (as well as priestly and royal missions, in the self-sacrificial sense) of Jesus. Our baptism calls us to seek and work toward one another’s salvation, not only our own. Nowhere, though, in our Rite of Baptism are we called to be “nice.”

This does not mean that we are to seek out opportunities to divide, to destroy relationships, to make enemies, or to scandalize one another unnecessarily. This would itself be sinful. Prophecy is never “all about me.” Instead, true prophecy is all about participating in God’s salvation of the world through prophets through the ages, like Jeremiah, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. Our baptismal prophetic mission is a participation in God’s salvation of the world. It will entail discernment of the sometimes fine line between revealing hard truths about the sin of the world, especially to people in positions of power, and contributing to the sin ourselves; between acting and speaking from our own ego and acting toward the best interests of one another; between being merely “nice” and being kind and just (the virtue we call Christian charity) even when we are angry (even justly so) at another person or at the sin of the world.

Without God, it may be possible to be at least superficially “nice,” but only by putting God first is it possible for us to be the prophets our baptism calls us to be, for one another’s salvation and the salvation of the world.